Key informant interviews are one of the most common data collection tools used in the evaluation of peacebuilding and conflict transformation. More than just common occurrence, key informant interviews are critical in gathering in-depth information on a particular issue or context, particularly if there is a need to understand motivation, behavior and perspectives. It’s also a great way to compliment quantitative data by providing greater context to the data.
Key informant interviews are common perhaps because of their cost: it is a cheap data collection tool and provides in-depth analytical information from ‘knowledgeable’ people, generally with first-hand knowledge or experience on a particular subject.
Methodology
There are three types of interviews: unstructured, semi-structured, and structured.
Unstructured interviews allow the interviewee to express himself/herself freely and allows for the emergence of unplanned topics at the behest of the interviewee. There is no predetermined set of questions, and the interviewer might intervene to ask for elaboration or follow-up questions.
Hot Tip! This type of interview is particularly useful at the start of an assessment or conflict or context analysis because it generally provides a global view of the systems in play and their major topics, issues and their interactions from the perspective of the interviewee.
Semi-structured interviews provide the interview with some focus, with a set of pre-determined questions but with a flexible format that allows the in-depth investigation of issues as they arise in the interview. This is probably the most frequently used format in key informant interviews because of its flexibility.
A structured interview, on the other hand, will present each interviewee with exactly the same questions in the same order to ensure that answers can be reliably aggregated, enabling comparisons between sample groups or sub-groups. The interviewee is not given the opportunity to express himself/herself freely, and the interviewer is restricted from asking additional or follow-up questions.
Hot Tip! This method can be particularly useful when you want to categorize points of view and/or information on the impact/outcomes of a project or program. This can then inform other data collection tool designs, such as questionnaires or surveys.
And keep in mind that observation can complement interview techniques by providing additional qualitative insights!
Hot Resources!
Direct Observation and Key informant Interview Techniques for Primary Data Collection During Rapid Assessments by The Assessments Capacities Project
Conducting In-Depth Interviews: A Guide for Designing and Conducting In-Depth Interviews for Evaluation Input by Carolyn Boyce and Palena Neale for Pathfinder International
Performance Monitoring and Evaluation TIPS: Conducting Key Informant Interviews by USAID
03/22/2013 at 12:20 PM
In regards to selecting a methodology, in the event that the interviewee is a key informant, or someone with first-hand knowledge, insight or experience on the subject you are researching I would advocate for a more unstructured and open-ended interview.
This would provide an opportunity for the informant to speak freely about how they view the situation and provide their own insight in their own terms. Such insight would be especially valuable in the initial phase of research conducted with a few key people because it may present issues that you were unaware of prior to the initial interview with the key informant. If the interview were too structured, there may be parts of their story or information that may not come out because the interviewer did not know to ask.
A useful tool in this methodology is an interview guide outlining key questions and points to cover, while also primarily allowing for the interviewee to share what they feel is important.
Gathering this initial in-depth information from knowledgeable people in the research context may prove invaluable in uncovering crucial aspects for further research, especially if you are unfamiliar with the context and in the initial phase of research.
02/25/2013 at 11:22 PM
I believe semi structured and structured interviews have their own pros and cons. With my own experience from conducting a field research where I used a structured interview, it was difficult for me to collect data so as to fit exactly in the categories that I had designed. However, once data was collected, it was very easy for me to analyze the data because I was using statistical tools for data analysis. As I was concerned with numeric values (since my research was quantifying the changes in community livelihood from economic, ecological and social perspectives), the structured interview helped me a lot to get the precise information and I could discard those that did not fit into my design. Well, I cannot however deny the fact that structured interviews have limitations. It is not easy to get responses from people in the way we want and if we tend to that we might be manipulating them in some ways. Many other forms of data is important in a research depending upon the nature of the research e.g. “meta data” as explained by social scientists may generate from silences, evasions and denials of respondents(Fujii, Lee Ann ( 2010). While conducting the semi structured interviews there is a high probability that one comes across these kinds of responses. In such interviews, people have more space to talk the truth, sometimes even invent stories and hide truth thus it is a challenge for a researcher to be able to absorb facts and discard the invalid and illogical information.
11/10/2012 at 4:27 PM
Dear Mr. White,
I agree that interviews are an indispensable tool for gathering information and complementing quantitative data. However, in the event that a researcher is attempting to quantify this type of qualitative data, what are some strategies for coding and categorizing? In the past, I have categorized by objectives, emotions, and themes. Do you have suggestions for making this more nuanced?